Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Appropriate or appropriate?

Adjective or Verb? Depends....especially when both are in play at the same time. Someone who may be acting inappropriate may at the same time try to appropriate something that is not his to have...or for that matter to touch, while at the same moment he is telling someone else to BE appropriate. I guess this is the usual "do what I say, not what I do" deal. On one hand it is okay (?) to burst into someone's house, begin yelling at them with profanity laden, anger driven ranting, but it is not okay for them to be wearing a tee shirt that you feel is not quite high enough to be appropriate? And to further demonstrate your superiority it is okay to appropriate a handful of the shirt and pull it to a more "appropriate" height? Nah, sorry buddy doesn't work that way. You toucha my daughter's shirt, you're gonna draw back a bloody stump!! (to put it in terms that may be better understood for the young sailor) But unfortunately, this is just another reminder that for some folks, Christianity is just another adjective, not a verb. To be Christ-like requires constant verb state; doing what He would do, because it is He who is doing it inside of you. Not the adjective state of "here is another title to carry around with my life". Because the adjective state will always be set aside by the underlying verb state. Who you really are inside will set the tone for who you really are, not what you like to be described as. I am a father, not because some adjective description has been hung around my neck, but because I spend every day of my life fathering my children and remaining responsible for the spiritual leadership in the house. I don't have the liberty of setting aside an adjective title to fulfill my own desires because I am a bond servant to the fatherhood God has called me to. Similarly, in my relationship with Christ, though the flesh would like to strike out at every attacker in the similar manner of their attack, Christ in me requires that, well....Christ be in me. I must be being Christ in me, because He IS!! As far as the bloody stump thing? Yep, that is part of fatherhood...until the day she is given to the one who will have her for the rest of her life...you're gonna answer to me!! Oh yeah, one more thing about cleaning the cupboards out of the items of clutter...I realized that it is NOT necessary to tell all they have been discarded or removed, rather to just let it be so. To tell is to give the flesh occasion to say "look what I have done, because of what you've done to me"....not a good proposition. Much more affirmative is to allow these things to make their way out with as little to do as possible. In some quarters, ignorance is indeed blissful!